Building a Dashboard - How To

Build your own dashboard - pick and choose the things that are important to you.

Your BMC TrueSight Pulse Dashboard starts with everything we thought could be important to you. Out of the box we give you our best guess on what you need. CPU, Memory, Disk and Network graphs show what is happening on your server.

But, we know this is just our best guess. The power needs to sit with you, so you can build what you need. So Build your own Dashboards was created to fill that gap and give the power back to you.

Lets get started.

You will notice there are two new visual elements on your dashboard.

The Dashboard picker at the top, that allows you to quickly change your dashboards

The Dashboard Edit tool which allows you to create or modify your existing dashboard

Lets modify the existing Dashboard, so click on the Dashboard Edit Tool.

In the editor, you can see the available Graphs that you can drag and drop over to your dashboard, you can click the X to remove any of the Graphs and you can preview your changes before saving them.

There are many customization options that alter the look and feel of your dashboard:

Header: contains the dashboard selector, the pause button and the time range selector. You probably want to keep these on unless you are using it as a wallboard, auto means we choose based on the size of your browser window.

Legend: contains the list of all of your servers. It is very handy to turn a server on or off by clicking on it in the legend, and it lets you know where your data is coming from.

Slider: The graph running on the bottom that lets you change your time range, quickly scroll back to another point in time and gives a nice overview of what is happening with the selected metric.

Pad: How much padding would you like between your Graphs?

Rows/Columns: How many rows and columns would you like in your dashboard?

Back Color: What color would you like the background to be?

Light Theme: Boundary support both a light and a dark theme, which one do you prefer?

Ok, now that we have gone over the basics, lets add some Graphs.

The Graphs have drag handles, so you can expand the graphs to the configuration that you want.

Graphs that have the same type of units can be added together. So if both graphs show percentages, or both graphs show bytes, or both graphs show a number, we can combine them into a single graph. By hovering over the top or the bottom of the graph, you can see split.

In the example dashboard we do not have an SDK hooked up, so lets get rid of the application graphs, expand the CPU and MEMORY graphs and add our disk stats and hit SAVE.

Now I have the dashboard that I wanted. But I want to have one dashboard with just CPU and Memory because sometimes that is all I want to look at.

So from the Dashboard selector, select create a new dashboard.

Configure the layout with just the CPU and Memory graphs, and give the dashboard a good name. Click Save and you now can select the new dashboard.

If you want to make the cpu-and-memory graph the default dashboard (so when you come back, this is the one that you see). You can either check the Make Default checkbox in the dashboard editor, or choose it in the Dashboard tab in Settings.